Chapter 1: How has YouTube become a staple in American classrooms?
Earlier this week, I hopped on a call with a middle school teacher.
I'm David Taylor. I'm a national board certified math teacher with almost 34 years of classroom experience.
It was the end of the school day, and David was calling from his classroom. He was wearing a Pirates jersey.
I'm also the father of an 18-year-old who's just going to be graduating in two weeks.
Oh, congratulations.
And as you can tell from my shirt, I live close to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
But we weren't there to talk baseball. I wanted to talk to David about technology and what it looks like in classrooms like his. David was a tech director back in the day. It was his job to make sure that his school had access to the latest technology.
I can tell you without any doubt whatsoever that technology enhances what I'm able to do in my classroom with my students and makes it more dynamic for me to teach.
And over the past decade, one tech platform that has taken over classrooms across the country is YouTube. As a teaching tool, David has seen how great YouTube can be. But at home, he'd always tried to limit how much his son used it. Then, a few years ago, when his son was still in middle school, David realized something.
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Chapter 2: What challenges do teachers face with YouTube in the classroom?
So instead of having bubble sheets, they could do your test and then immediately see your grade and then that's it.
It didn't hurt that over the next few years, more and more schools across the country embraced one-to-one devices, the idea being that every student would get their own laptop to access the internet. Chromebooks are typically cheaper than PCs and Apple laptops, and they became the go-to device for many school districts.
Google says about 10,000 schools right now use Chromebooks. School students are going to be getting Chrome laptops. Eighth grade class is learning to use a brand new classroom tool, Google Chromebooks. 60,000 Chromebooks are going to be given out to Lee County students.
There are some Google executives who kind of had espoused this utopian vision of personalized learning for children in the classroom. So, you know, your teacher could be talking and then like there could be a group here learning on Chromebooks at like their level. But then this other group learning on Chromebooks at another level.
And then it's not like the teacher has to make sure all 30 kids are teaching to them at the same time on the same level. So like that was one of the things that they really talked about. This could really personalize education. And what was in the Chromebook, just to be clear? Like, what did it come with? It's really optimized for Google software.
And what schools loved about it is its simplicity. It's, you know, for your browsing the Internet, doing your research, writing your papers. So students could use Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides.
And then there was also YouTube.
The reason why some schools decided to allow for students to browse YouTube is that they saw this as sort of like a research tool. Like, think of Britannica. In a similar light, they thought that a student could go and, like, watch the I Have a Dream speech or find some historical material.
Just as I have a dream...
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Chapter 3: What strategies did Google employ to increase YouTube's presence in schools?
YouTube has said it will appeal the ruling.
Some of the children I interviewed for the story talked to me about how they were just kind of entranced by watching these YouTube shorts on their devices. It was almost like once they get on those shorts, it's like they couldn't look away. And, you know, one of the children that I talked to is actually beginning specialized treatment for Internet addiction at Boston Children's Hospital.
One day, he scrolled through more than 200 videos between 9 and 11.40 a.m. on March 6th, so before lunchtime.
And presumably they're supposed to be, you know, in class at that time learning other stuff. Yes. Shalini heard stories of students using school devices to watch prank videos and sports highlights with betting odds and videos of other kids playing Fortnite or Roblox and whatever else the algorithm fed them.
You know, what's interesting is Google, even prior to the pandemic, was aware there were some problems with the YouTube educational push. Like I saw documents where they fretted about how the YouTube experience in K-12 schools was broken.
Like, you know, we saw some internal documents from 2018 and 2019 where there's like a Google user experience team detailing all the ills that affected viewer well-being on YouTube online. And among them, they named that addictive gaming content was being sought out by inappropriately aged children.
Children were entering therapy after watching sexually graphic content and exposure to videos decreased attention spans. And there's a whole presentation I've seen about that. And they were basically detailing ills affecting viewer well-being based on external research.
For many teachers, the integration of YouTube in classrooms has become a complicated daily challenge. Did you see the benefits of having YouTube in class right away? Was that clear to you?
Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I will say, all right, I need you to watch this video about solving absolute value inequalities and try to get your head wrapped around how this works. But that's a good part.
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Chapter 4: How did the pandemic impact YouTube's role in education?
And then I have the ability to close a tab or block a certain thing so I can monitor what they're doing when I don't want to hover over them all the time.
But even this monitoring software isn't foolproof because kids have figured out how to get around it. Students have found all kinds of loopholes and backdoors to schools' attempts at blocking YouTube. They'll log out of their district accounts or share links to videos through Google Slides and Docs. Google said it's fixed the Slides and Docs bug.
Every time that we put something into place, there's a workaround.
Yeah.
You know, it's a continuous workaround.
Sounds like a whack-a-mole almost.
It is a whack-a-mole.
Yeah.
It's one of the things that makes—teaching's not the same that it used to be 34 years ago. You know, I used to use an overhead projector and go to the library. Remember those. You know, exactly, right? With a grease pencil or some type of, you know, overhead marker or whatever. And that worked just fine. But now we added all this other stuff in, but it just causes more—
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Chapter 5: What concerns have emerged regarding YouTube's effects on students?
But if you, you know, you weight it, like maybe a weighted average, since I'm a math teacher, the 50 to 5 ratio wouldn't really matter. They'd almost be equal, right? Because... The things that are bad about it is that it interrupts their learning. It's a distraction. It's temptation. It's a way for them to escape from the reality of whatever it is that they are actually dealing with.
It's just a challenge. I don't want to teach without it. You know, but it's just so hard. I mean, as an educator, yes, it's worth it. As a parent, I wasn't sure all the time. But that's the type of world that we live in anymore, right? It's this dichotomy. It's two sides of the same coin. And we have to make choices about what we value and how to best manage all of it.
David, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on this.
You're welcome. Thank you.
Before we go, we have a question for you. Are you in college or a recent college graduate? If so, how are you feeling about AI in your career and why? We'd love to hear from you. Send us a voice memo to thejournalatwsj.com and we might include it in an upcoming episode. That's all for today, Friday, May 22nd. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.
The show is made by Evelyn Fajardo-Alvarez, Laura Benshoff, Katherine Brewer, Piaget Khari, Max Green, Sophie Codner, Ryan Knutson, Matt Kwong, Colin McNulty, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez-Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Piers Singhi, Jivika Verma, Katherine Whalen, Tatiana Zamise, and me, Jessica Mendoza.
Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapak, and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week from Peter Leonard, Nathan Singapak, So Wiley, and Blue Dot Sessions. Fact Checking by Mary Mathis. Thanks for listening. We're out on Monday for Memorial Day. We'll be back on Tuesday.
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